Marrakech, Morocco: When night comes falling

Graham Reid | Jul 29, 2012 | 2 min read

As anyone who has had the good fortune
to go will tell you, Marrakech is a city of noise, especially in the
grand central square. Here by day snake charmers and fortune tellers
call for attention, motor scooters blat past, cars on the unmarked
road around the perimeter sound their horns, fruit and vegetable
sellers shout invitations at you to sample from their attractive
displays, Berber musicians play impromptu sessions, people hold
animated conversations . . .

And at night when the restaurant tables
are set up, it happens all over again. But more of it, and louder.

Little wonder then that many retreat to
rooftop cafes and restaurants to eat delicious meals prepared in the
ubiquitous tagines, and sip sweet mint tea in the relative quiet.

But there is another Marrakech. The
silent city.

Late at night after the tourists have
drifted away, when the restaurant tables have been stacked in a
corner and the musicians are nodding down into low, trance-like
rhythms, the lanes and blind alleys off the square – also crowded
by day with merchants, pedestrians, donkey cars and scooters – are
deserted.

The wares have been stowed away and the
narrow lanes now appear as wide as streets under the jaundiced glow
of intermittent light bulbs and flickering fluorescent tubes. Once
familiar lanes now look disorientingly different. This is now a world
owned by wandering cats and old men sleeping in deep doorways.

Footsteps echo off stone walls and
heavy wooden doors, locals retreat to the inward looking homes and
riads, and Marrakech can be eerily silent.

Like Venice in winter when
the stones freeze to the touch and black canals are as still as
death, Marrakech at midnight and beyond is a very different world.

Up ahead in a lane an unseen door
closes with a low thud, down an alley hooded figures move into fuzzy
pools of light and disappear again as they sink into deep shadow, a
bundle of rags moves as an old man shifts into a more comfortable
position . . . .

The smells of the day – incense,
spice and the dusty odour of old material and wood – seems to have
disappeared into the black sky above the lane's webbing of sticks and
tattered cloth, the world here is now still.

A distant radio brings
the barely audible sound of an exotic song, made all the more
mysterious by being so disembodied in the night.

For the late stayer, or early riser who
gets into the alleys and lanes before merchants open their doors and
unload wares onto the street and the calls to prayer started to echo
above, Marrakech can reveal itself in a very different way.

One morning early we walked as sleep
rubbed itself out of the eyes of cool lanes. Unused to seeing
tourists out at this time, vendors smiled and chatted with no thought
to making a sale so early. And we were waved into a place we might
otherwise never have seen, or given a quick go-by during brighter,
more hard-sell hours.

It was like entering the last moments
of Citizen Kane where the exotic loot of the world has been
stored in a warehouse. This was a living market yawning into the dawn
as the owner shuffled around and women swept the floor.

No one tried
to sell us anything, so we lingered undisturbed.

Later in the day, by
chance, we passed the same place. It now seemed unrecognisable.
Outside were stacks of doors and mirrors, people cajoling tourists
passing-by to come inside (none did that we saw) and a sense of
urgency which hadn't been there previously.

Marrakech seemed like that most of the
time, urgent and busy.

But Marrakech can be as quiet as it noisy. For
those who make time to find the silence.

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